


you're looking for the creator, but the monster is all that's left

by kwritten



Series: Saltzman sisters on the Upper East Side [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Siblings, F/F, Femslash, Half-Sibling Incest, Multi, Seduction, Threesome - F/F/F, Threesome - F/F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 03:36:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5481965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>As children they trained with swords and shields, but no one told them that the heart isn't a dragon - it's not something you're supposed to slay.</i>
</p><p>“She set our History teacher’s car on fire,” Elena said placidly, taking a sip of water afterwards.<br/>Isobel’s eyes were sparkling.<br/>Alaric straightened in his chair. He had forty minutes and counting. He could parent, goddamnit. “Okay,’ he said slowly. “Why?”<br/>“Why?” Isobel burst out.<br/>“Yes,” he glared at her. “Our daughter committed arson. I want to know why.”<br/>“That’s where you’re starting, dad? You want to know why?” Elena looked like she was about to send him to his room without dessert.<br/>“You’re… grounded?” he looked at Dawn, who smiled brightly at him. He looked back at Isobel, who was rubbing her temples with her fingers, her eyes closed. “Look! I presume that my kid wouldn’t just set a car on fire for the pleasure of seeing it burn since she’s never set anything on fire befo—Is this your first attempt at arson?” Dawn nodded. “Okay then, I’d like to know why."</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're looking for the creator, but the monster is all that's left

**Author's Note:**

> some slight reference to abuse in section three, blink and you miss it - but it's there as a general warning

I must record an incident which took place when I was four years of age […] a desire to bind as possible the ties of domestic love, determined my mother to consider Elizabeth as my wife, a design which she never found to repent.  
From this time Elizabeth Lavenza became my playfellow and, as we grew older, my friend. She was docile and good yet gay and playful as a summer insect […] I loved to tend as I should on a favorite animal… ( _Frankenstein_ , Mary Shelley)

 

**_one: believe that you can be loved,  
ignore your heartless body, accept the novelty of her eyes_ **

 

Dinner is the best time, the four of them shouting things like _cite your evidence_ as they hand each other bowls of mashed potatoes and caramelized beets. They rewrite history over salmon and cause a war over marginalia while eating veggie lasagna. She grows up thinking that this is what family is, a dictionary permanently at the father’s elbow and a wall of encyclopedias in the dining room – just in case. She grows up thinking that this is what dinner is, a dissertation exercise, an excuse to research and argue, a warzone that is ended in the kitchen with suds up to your elbows and mom sitting on the kitchen counter eating ice cream out of the carton, dad accepting defeat because he wants a bite and everyone laughing. 

She is invited to a friend’s for dinner in the fifth grade. They talk about errands and soccer games and it actually takes her longer than it should to realize that the parents are only talking to each other, making lists about chores and duties and minutia. No one mentions Plutarch even once. She cries into her string beans and is never invited to dinner again. 

Dinner is the best time, the four of them laughing as they try to keep their tacos together in their hands while pitting mother against father and sister against sister over names and dates and places long since dead and gone. She thinks that this is what family is, she knows this is what love is, research and arguments and debates about wars that turn into domestic battles that can last hours or minutes or months, a pile of limbs on the couch correcting documentaries and historical dramas for all of their inaccuracies, a chart in the kitchen for reading assignments instead of chores, _Words with Friends_ games with intricate rules and real-world consequences, a chess set permanently in-play in the living room, and feels very sorry for anyone that doesn’t have this. 

She wasn’t born into this, but they tell her she was born _for_ this and that is where the story actually begins. 

 

_She remembers being four years or five, sitting in her mother’s lap, and feeling like they were waiting for something. When it is only the two of them, it always feels like they are waiting for something. They turn to each other, mother and daughter, when waiting is needed. She thinks maybe that was what she was born for, to fill the spaces in between where the rest of them are._

_This is what it means to her to be a Saltzman._

_She remembers being four or five, sitting in her mother’s lap, and watching her father usher in a small girl with wide eyes and long hair. In her memory he says,_ Look what I found for you _and he is talking to her, but in the moment he was looking at their mother._

_Everything in her world that doesn’t belong to her belongs to her mother. The universe was created to make her mother smile. That is the first story her father tells her._

_Her father hands her a girl with wide eyes and long hair and she accepts the responsibility of having a sister as if she was created for it. One of them was created for something. One of them should be possessed and the other should be responsible._

_They take turns._

_It never occurs to her that he was talking to her mother. That this gift belongs to them and not to her. What she knows about her world is that she has two heartbreakingly beautiful parents and they gave her a sister._

_It never occurs to her that she’s the one created to be possessed._

_Her father only tells her stories about things that are true. Her mother only tells her stories about things that she believes are true. It takes her a long time to figure out how these truths are so terribly different. In the end, she doesn’t care._

_The first story they tell her together is of a long lost sister, a sister with long limbs and a broken heart. He tells her that he will find the lost daughter and bring her home. She tells her that he will find the lost sister and bring her home. She learns everything she knows about sisters from their stories, tales of sacrifice and love and redemption and tears. It never occurs to them that they are telling her all the wrong stories._

_He finds something that was lost and brings her home and she calls it **mine** and they don’t disagree._

 

There are four rooms in their house. 

A room for their parents, it is warm and always smells like lavender and spices, a great chair in the corner covered in books and papers, a trunk at the end of the bed full of sharp, heavy things they aren’t supposed to know about, his socks on the floor and her bras hanging off the edge of the always-unmade bed. 

A room for their parent’s work, it is warm and always smells like old books, a desk on either side of the room – one facing the window covered in old cups of half-drunk tea and one facing a framed copy of Fuseli’s _Nightmare_ covered in strange objects of dubious origin – and a couch in the middle covered in papers and books and tables and bookshelves in every open space, it is cramped and dark and there is a dull red wallpaper peeking out over and between the edges of their things. 

A room for their work, it is warm and always smells like the rosewood incense Dawn bought at a Ren Faire one year long ago that’s scent somehow seeped into the hardwood floors and rugs and lavender curtains permanently, with two desks facing each other in the middle of the room, their childhood art littering the walls and piles of crumpled up paper on the floor, it is light and airy and there’s a cherry tree outside the window that blooms white and pink in the spring and shadows the room in a brilliant glow. 

A room for them, it is warm and always smells green because the window is always open, with two thin beds arranged in an L in one corner, one covered in piles of clothes and books and the other unmade with too many pillows and far too many stuffies, the floor littered with piles of clothes and shoes and bags, and a small bookshelf full of only notebooks and journals that bear their own words. 

The rest of the house is for their books. Their mother sometimes stands in the middle of what another family would call a ‘den’ and they lovingly call a ‘library’ and wonders aloud whether the books are one day going to push them out of the house altogether, the four of them living in the backyard in tents because they’ve been overrun. The next day she always brings home a box of books from an estate sale or a library give-away and they spend the evening forgetting everything and getting lost in old editions of books they’ve already read a thousand times or newly discovered treasures and end up having to order pizza because they’ve lost track of time and there’s no point cooking at ten o’clock. There’s no safe corner of the house, no place where one isn’t in danger of tripping over a pile of books or a cat lounging in a patch of sun. None of them can ever remember actively seeking out any of the cats that seem to live among the piles of books, or even putting forth the effort to feed or care for them, or how many there are actually are, but there’s a litter box in the laundry room and cans of cat food in the pantry. 

The house is warm and always smells like paper and dust and something warm and baking. Elena and Isobel discovered bread machines together at a garage sale and were taught by a very sweet old lady down the street how to make it work. Dawn and Alaric discovered crockpots while standing in line at the supermarket and were taught by a couple of nice young men how to make them work. It makes them feel slightly normal, coming home to a house that smells like food and spices. Not that they know better than to think that everyone else lives this way, too – picking their way around piles of research, eating dinner at midnight because everyone forgot that eating is something they’re supposed to do. Isobel always says that they will get better, but as the girls get older there’s less reason to and then they all enable each other so she gives up. 

They argue over the Reformation and Oscar Wilde and Elena breaks the cardinal rule: no Foucault at the dinner table and she’s on dish-duty for the next week. She climbs the stairs up to their room and collapses into bed on top of her sister and falls asleep in her jeans and their father’s favorite sweatshirt. 

When she first moves into the Saltzman home and is told, _You are a Saltzman_ , she doesn’t believe it. She’s been told a lot of things before. They show her a picture of Isobel holding a red-faced infant and say, _That’s you,_ they show her another one that looks the same, but in this one Alaric is pressing his laughing face into his wife’s shoulder and they say, _That is your sister_ and she believes the second one first and the first one much, much later. Having a sister, it turns out, is the easiest thing she’s ever believed in. She’s been told, _You are family_ , so many times in her short life that it never sounds like the truth and there was no reason for it to feel true now, but _You are a sister_ is new and sounds a bit like magic. 

When she first moves into the Saltzman home she is given to a small girl with bright green eyes and long hair and knobby knees and over her head the man says, _For you_ and she feels possessed. They show her to a room with a single bed inside and lots of toys and books and clothes and they hug her and say goodbye. She has done this before. She looks around at the room and feels lonely for the very first time in her short, small life. 

When you grow up alone you don’t think to be lonely, but belonging to someone is a very different experience and it changed her whole world. 

Ten minutes after she heard all the doors close and was sure she wouldn’t be caught and told not to, she stole her way across the hall and snuck into Dawn’s room. She stood at the foot of the bed and said, _Am I really yours?_ instead of asking, _Am I really your sister?_ , but to them it was all the same. The girl held out her hand and it never occurred to either of them to ever be parted from that moment forward. 

Within two days of her moving into the Saltzman home, they stand shoulder to shoulder and direct their parents to move her bed into Dawn’s room. That she never uses it is a different issue that no one thinks to address. What could be more natural that sleeping with your arms wrapped around the person that calls you, _mine_. 

She had a history before the day she walked through the doors of the place she learned over time was _home_ , but she works very hard at forgetting it. Her sister asks her for stories, but she doesn’t want to remember all the rooms and faces and places where she was alone and didn’t belong, so she turns back and says, _Where was I?_

Their father tells stories about things that are true, battles and wars and debates and movements and secret moments. He has journals in his office that she’s pretty sure belong in a museum or that he stole from a museum. His stories rarely have an ending at all, he tells them, _history is still happening, how can there be an end_ and they smile up at him. 

Their mother tells stories about things that she believes are true, full of magic and heartbreak and broken bones and sacred artifacts and creatures no one can prove to her _aren’t_ real. Her stories feel more true to their own lives than the ones their father tells, but she can’t quite put her finger on why. Her stories have bloody endings that she never altered for their sensitive childhood hearts, she tells them, _the world is bloody, why would I lie_ and they smile up at her. 

Dawn tells stories about things that she _makes_ true by telling them, wars and magic and knights and swords and princesses that do more than kiss the prince or wait for the full moon to destroy them. Dawn creates a history for her when she asks her to, and so she fills in those lonely gaps that should be stories of social workers and cramped rooms with fairies and cloudy knights and in them Elena is a hero. Her stories become true because they’d all rather believe them than the alternative, Elena may have been lost, but she was found and her story is just beginning. 

Elena writes down secret stories she never tells them of a world where they always existed together, where she wasn’t lost and found, where she reached out a chubby hand and touched her sister’s red face seconds after she was born. Her stories are mundane and ordinary, picnics in the park and childhood arguments and learning how to walk, how to eat, how to read, how to speak, with her sister beside her and their parents looking on. She writes stories that she wishes were true, but keeps them hidden. She starts to feel as though she wrote Dawn into being, a chubby toddler that no one speaks of but lives on the pages of her notebooks. She has no memories of her sister, but she has her words, and those feel more real. 

All her life she writes her sister into being and is never surprised to wake up and see her standing there in flesh and blood. She imagined her before they met, and it’s the most dangerous secret she can never admit to. 

Sometimes she writes down Dawn’s stories in between her own, and in them they are both lost or their parents are lost and need to be found. She changes her sister’s stories and makes them about the two of them instead of just her alone. It’s not that she thinks the other way isn’t grand: a little girl battling demons and fairies and dancing with princes; but when she closes her eyes at night, a fairy tale with two princesses arm-in-arm feels more like a memory than a fantasy. 

Their father raises them on _truth_ , their mother raises them on _belief_ , her sister takes those two things and gives back something like _hope_ , Elena listens and dreams of stars and learns to call everything they tell her, _family_. 

There are four rooms in their house with doors that close, two for dreaming and two for writing. Dreaming in this house is done tangled up in a body lying next to yours. Writing in this house is knowing without looking that someone is nearby writing with the same vigor as you. Reading in this house is knowing without looking that every other soul that is important in your life is dancing along to the beat of words printed in black on white pages. 

Everything about sisters they learn from words and they don’t realize until much later that there were words they ignored and stories they should have heard and stories they never should have written. 

_Am I really yours?_ She is six years old and shivering with fear and doesn’t realize there’s a word missing in that query. Semantics can destroy a life or create something truly terrifying before there’s time to stop it. Words can come slipping out the lips of the most innocent child and in that pure, starlit moment, the entire world is changed. 

It’s always too late. 

_Yes. You’re mine._ She is four years old and has never known pain or loneliness and doesn’t yet know that there are things she cannot have. Words have a greater power than we are taught to believe in, men behind pulpits tell us that it is a man and not their words that changed the world, that save us, that damn us. Everything begins in the space between thought and said, invented and written down. 

This was their beginning and their end. 

Their father taught them to look at the pages and annals of history and divine the truth from the leaves and words left behind; their mother taught them to look at the signs and the impossible and seek a truth that others ignore. Their parents taught them that the truth of stories was found between the lines, in the places that no one was willing to look.

They were writing their own world before they were ready for the responsibility and were never taught to seek forgiveness for presuming to be gods. 

They were fearless and therefore powerful. 

 

 

**_two: sink into the warmth that they offer you, maybe  
you deserve it_ **

 

Alaric looked up from his newspaper, tilting his head so that he could see her clearly over the edge of his glasses, and burst out quite suddenly, “Hey, how old are you, kid?”

She looked older than she should be, her long thin neck holding up a face that looked worldly and beautiful instead of innocent and cute. Wasn’t she just five yesterday, barely able to wrap her little fingers around his index finger last week, wasn’t she growing too tall too fast?

Dawn blinked at him, a book perched behind her bowl of oatmeal and a cup of coffee clasped in the other hand, “Um? Dad?”

He turned to his wife, because this is something she probably knows and they will all laugh at him for not knowing, he ignored their elder daughter sitting on his right because she will probably answer with something practical like, _two years younger than me_ , which at that moment was the only number that he could accurately remember. “Isobel? How old are your daughters?” When he felt in danger of failing as a father they were always _hers_. 

Isobel had her laptop at the table and looked up at him guiltily. 

The entire household voted to outlaw electronics at the table after they learned that Dawn and Elena were txting each other during dinner which was revealed only seconds after learning that Alaric and Dawn were playing _Words with Friends_ on their phones at the table only moments after Isobel started swearing up a storm about that asshole Jeff in the Humanities Department for sending out another mass email that passive-aggressively attacked her research. Dinner was forgotten. Dawn had to do the dishes alone for getting help from Elena during the game, which was expressly forbidden, and a new rule was created. 

“I’m sorry, what?”

Elena snorted and Dawn kicked her under the table. 

Alaric looked back at the newspaper, “Just wondering how old your daughters are, dear.” He was trying too hard to make his tone sound light and curious, her distracted response was only to his benefit. If he played his cards right, she would be the one to take the fall for him forgetting something so vital. 

It crossed his mind that she sounded a bit guilty, but it didn’t seem relevant in the moment. 

Isobel froze, her fingers hovering over the keyboard, as if he wouldn’t notice the laptop because she wasn’t moving. She glanced between her girls, one eating oatmeal silently and reading a warn hardback of _A Tree Grows in Brooklyn_ while the other sketched lazily on a pad of paper with only a hot cup of coffee in front of her, occasionally stealing a grape from a bowl in the center of the table. Both were too-studiously ignoring the conversation happening right in front of their noses. 

She smirked, closed the lid of her computer, and set it carefully on the ground next to her. “What is the date today, Alaric?”

“February 21st,” he said without missing a beat. 

“That’s not today’s paper, dad,” Elena pointed out helpfully, pursing her lips at the page in front of her. Dawn cleared her throat and held out her hand, looked at the sketch for a moment before shrugging and handing it back across the table. 

He must have picked up yesterday’s paper off the counter by mistake.

Isobel blinked at the exchange. Was this what breakfast was always like? “Aren’t you going to eat anything for breakfast, Elena?”

Dawn rolled her eyes and went back to her book, “Aren’t you going to tell dad how old I am?”

“I’ve been up for like three hours, mom. This is my second cup of coffee,” Elena sighed deeply. “I already ate breakfast.”

Alaric sat his paper down, “Why were you up so early?”

“She went for a run,” Dawn pulled a pencil out of the ponytail on the top of her head and scribbled something in the margin of her book. When she laid it down on the table, Isobel could see that the pages were full of similar notes. “Find some chill, guys. She does this every morning.”

“Did you know about this?” Isobel leaned forward and smiled at her husband. 

“I feel a little betrayed,” he said soberly. “Should we ask her to explain herself?”

Elena took a sip of her coffee serenely, “When is my birthday?”

Dawn raised her hand in the air excitedly, “Oh please pick me! I know! I know!”

Isobel laughed, “One of them is fifteen, does that help?”

Alaric looked from Elena to Dawn and back again. They could practically _hear_ the gears in his brain chugging along. “Fifteen,” he pointed at Elena. “Thirteen,” he pointed at Dawn. 

Two years apart, one grade apart. They had always seemed a little resentful about both of those facts. When Dawn had turned seven she had blamed Alaric personally for not having the forethought to make sure they were the same age and had the same birthday. He presumed that in the past eight years she had forgiven him for that, but with teenage girls there was really no way of knowing. 

Or at least that was what the internet told him, so far raising Dawn and Elena hadn’t been anything like what the internet and television had warned him it would be. Which lead into why he had asked his question in the first place, the article in his hands burning into his retinas. He had optimistically hoped that this day would never come. 

“Should we…” he looked over at Isobel expectantly. “I mean… have you…?” Her lips started to curl up at the corners and he was sure he was turning bright red. “There’s been a safe sex talk right?”

Isobel formed a little circle with her lips as if she was surprise. “You know? I thought you were the better person to handle that?” She stood up, her laptop appearing in her left hand, “You should probably do that now.”

Alaric was left alone, his two teenage daughters blinking over at him curiously. He cleared his throat awkwardly and tried to ignore the faint sounds of Isobel laughing coming from the library. “So… um… boys…”

Dawn shook her head at him, eyes steady. 

“In the beginning of time, there was Adam and Eve?” Elena reached over and grabbed the crust of toast left in Dawn’s otherwise empty oatmeal bowl. “Start smaller.”

“Feelings… you will have _feelings_ for boys,” he turned to Dawn. Dawn had always been easier. “That’s okay. It’s just important not to… what?” She was still shaking her head at him slowly. 

“Wrong daughter, dude. I don’t boys.”

He considered momentarily how likely it was that the floor would swallow him whole, “No?”

“Nope,” she was a bit too cheerful for a girl that was coming out of the closet to her dad at nine o’clock on a Saturday sitting at the breakfast table. “So you can skip the whole condoms part of the lecture.” She nodded over at Elena, “That one, though…”

“Hey!” Elena sounded affronted. “I don’t really boys either.”

“Matt Donovan.”

“Well…”

Dawn started listing off names on her fingers, “Gilbert Blythe. Isaac Lacey. Gilbert Thumperstein.”

Elena interrupted her with a peal of laughter, “You’re just making up names now.” She turned to Alaric, reaching out her hand to pat his gently, “You can give me the condom talk if it makes you feel better and I promise to pretend to be surprised.”

He rubbed his face with his hands, “This isn’t going very well.”

“Even the best parents aren’t exactly equipped to perform a safe sex talk,” Elena said consolingly. 

“Probably why most schools in this country still stand behind abstinence,” Dawn had picked up her book again. Elena snickered and kicked her sister under the table. 

Alaric let a beat pass. “So… just to check in, everyone is a lesbian for the most part and we never need to discuss condoms in this house ever again. And I’m probably not going to have the pleasure of threatening any young men with my extensive weapons collection.”

“Oh!? I could bring home an older guy with tattoos and motorcycle if you’re really feeling like you are missing out,” Elena teased. 

God he really hoped she was teasing. 

Dawn put a finger in between the pages of her book and looked over at him with wide eyes, “What do you know about dental dams?”

Elena fell off of her chair and Isobel’s laughter started ringing in his ears. “You,” he pointed at Dawn accusingly, “are supposed to be the easy one. Haven’t we always been pals?”

She shrugged, “I’ll go to a ball game and gape at the cheerleaders with you if it will make you feel better.”

He stood up, “So glad we had this chat girls. Do your homework or something.” Once he was on the other side of the room and feeling pretty comfortable with the fact that the conversation was over, at least, Dawn called his name. Something pink flashed through the air and he caught it without thinking. He looked down at the object in his hand. It was a bright pink condom. 

“You just aren’t ready for parenthood, kiddo,” Dawn said solemnly. 

“Don’t have sex. Cause you _will_ get pregnant, and die,” Elena giggled from the floor. 

“You’re both grounded,” he growled before escaping as quickly as he could to the library, where Isobel was waiting – red-faced with laughter, tears streaming down her face. 

“One week,” he moaned as he collapsed onto the floor in front of her, angling for a neck massage at best or at least her fingers combing through his hair. “They’re both grounded for a week.” Her fingernails scraped at his scalp and he leaned back into her touch, closing his eyes. “Do they… go out?”

“They’re girls.” She said simply, “They go out.”

“Where?”

“Running. Shopping. Parties. I don’t know. Out. Probably know the Met more intimately than any teenager should.”

He hummed and they sat in silence for a while as she typed out something with her swift fingers on her laptop. It was warm in the library, his back pressed against her legs, the soft sounds of the girls clattering around in the kitchen floating through the house. A cat brushed past his legs. 

“You could have given me a little warning,” he finally spluttered out, eyes flying open. “Aren’t we supposed to tell each other the important things?”

“I do tell you the important things,” Isobel said distractedly. 

“Lesbians!” Alaric threw up his arms impatiently, jostling her laptop and causing her to hiss slightly. The cat blinked at him and then looked away, bored. “You told me when Elena got a C in biology but not when Dawn came out?”

“She got a C for refusing to dissect a frog. And the principal wouldn’t return my phone calls or emails. Remember?”

“You let me walk into that situation blind!”

“It’s a story they’ll tell our grandchildren.” She paused and then laughed softly, “Hell, I’ll probably tell it at the next staff meeting.”

“You could have told me,” he groused, determined to feel put-out by the situation for as long as possible. 

Someone knocked softly on the wall and he looked up to see Elena and Dawn looking down at him worriedly. “Hey dad?” Elena sunk down on her haunches. “We were teasing before but… you _do_ know that it is June and not February, right?”

Dawn leaned against the wall, her arms folded over her chest, “We just don’t want you to get mad if we aren’t doing homework later. School’s been out for over a month already.”

Alaric narrowed his eyes, “You’re fucking with me.”

“You picked the paper up off the top of the recycling pile instead of getting the new one. We thought you were joking about the February thing, but then we found this morning’s paper on the kitchen counter,” Elena frowned at him. “And you do know our birthdays, right?”

“Hers is next week, that’s why she’s worried,” Dawn said pointedly. 

“We’re still going to _Hamilton_ , girls. Don’t worry,” Isobel reassured them. “I switched out his coffee for decaf this morning and I realize now that was a mistake.”

“You fed us decaf!?” Elena sounded mortally wounded. 

“I’m fixing this,” Dawn turned from the room, her ponytail swinging, clearly fed up with the lot of them. “You’ll have proper coffee in your hand in no time, dad.”

Elena stood up and shook her head at Isobel, “I’m really disappointed in you, mom.”

In the silence the two girls left behind, Alaric turned to his wife and whispered, “Have they always been this serious about coffee?”

Isobel kicked him away from her, “They’re _your_ daughters.”

They were always _his_ daughters when coffee was involved. 

 

 

**_three: believe that you deserve to be loved, take that love for granted,  
wash your hands in blood_ **

 

Elena kisses Matt Donovan after school when she is twelve and he tastes salty and sweet, but nothing flutters in her chest and she feels a little disappointed about that, but he looks at her so adoringly that she does it again. When she climbs into bed that night, Dawn is on her stomach reading something she pilfered from Alaric’s desk, it’s old and has beautiful pictures, and Elena has to climb over her to get to her spot next to the wall. They don’t talk about her having a boyfriend now, or Dawn’s soccer game the following day, or how Isobel’s cooking seems to be getting worse. Elena lies on her back, her shoulder pressed against Dawn’s shoulder, and they say nothing at all. She goes steady with Matt Donovan for two years and it’s pleasant enough for what it is. They never talk about it. She likes to be liked by boys, but it feels like she’s scratching at the edges of something that she’d rather hold firmly in her hand. 

Their favorite games to play when they are children involve swords. Their parents help them create a rather stunning little collection of weapons and armor. 

They play Camelot but leave out Arthur and Lancelot, let Morgaine and Guinevere take all the credit and none of the blame. No one told them that there is a truth to villains and not to admire them. No one told them stories only work if you let the heroes be heroes and let the damsels be damsels. No one ever told them that there is a right way and a wrong way to read a story, they were taught to find lessons that others overlook, to find a meaning behind the words, they learn nothing from tragedies except that they are beautiful. 

They are romantic little bloodthirsty creatures. They kill all of their stuffies at least three times a week. Isobel strongly discourages Alaric from continuing to read them _Lord of the Rings_ before bed, but she’s terrible at saying no to them and he doesn’t see any harm in it. They fight side-by-side against the hoards to rescue a treasure or a doll or whatever cat was handy at the time. 

Every adventure, every battle, every daring foray into pirate waters, ends with a kiss. 

They pick out all the best parts of all the stories that they love the most. There is always a betrayal, there is always a funeral, and they sometimes can’t both make it out alive. They almost seem to like it best to lose one another, hugging each other tearfully and tightly once the game is over as if the one playing dead was in true danger. They die in each other’s arms over and over as if to prove to each other that they couldn’t survive it. 

Once, Isobel walked past a warzone to see Elena cradling Dawn in her lap, pressing a soft kiss against her lips. At her mother’s perplexed expression, she explained carefully, _She is Éowyn and she just killed the Nazgûl!_ Isobel smiled, _And you are Merry?_ Elena rose carefully, folding Dawn’s hands across her chest, and then looked at her mother, offended, _I am Éomer,_ as if that should have been painfully obvious. The girl turned back to her game with enthusiasm. Isobel presumed that Éowyn was safely resurrected and presumably married off to Faramir as the game was well over before dinner. 

They are so devoted to the stories that they read together, curled up on their bed, Dawn’s shoulder on Elena’s, their small hands holding up the large books they gather like treasures from their parents’ collection, that they sometimes seem to be incapable of separating themselves out from the stories themselves. For an entire year, Elena insists on being called _Wendy_ and Dawn will answer only to _Pan_ , they collect acorns and thimbles and leave them scattered all over the house. 

They decide _The House of Usher_ would be more interesting if the narrator was a ghost. They tell the cat to play the ghost. The cat leaves and they don’t notice. Their makeshift house falls around them and Alaric finds them playing dead wrapped in each other’s arms, beneath a pile of pillows and blankets. He takes them out for ice cream.

When she is twelve, Elena kisses Matt Donovan after school and he tastes disappointing and she is jealously impatient when her sister doesn’t seem to care. When she is thirteen, she kisses Matt Donovan like a bad habit and Dawn confides that she probably won’t ever kiss a boy at all, she sees no point in it. 

It is the first time that they are different and Elena cries into her pillow in frustration as if that will make them mirrors once again. 

They learned all about slaying demons with swords and rescuing damsels from pirates, they practiced mock funerals and mock weddings, they buried each other and they married each other and they gave each other away, but they never practiced the art of not being beside each other. One dies, is buried, and then pops back up, a cheeky smile on her face and a tear resting prettily on the edge of her cheek. They wrap their skinny arms around each other and cry as if it were real, as if their playacting at death can prepare them for reality. 

Their games grow more macabre, their love and hearts the battleground for stories that shouldn’t be taken lightly. 

Elena prefers to be the kind of hero with a cigarette hanging from her lips and a pen in her hand and a vague sense of bored restlessness hanging over her heart. 

Dawn prefers playing heroes with swords and quests, with fragile hearts and a sense of responsibility hanging over her heart. 

No one ever told them heroes like these are supposed to fall in love with light-hearted maidens and not each other. No one told them heroes like these can’t survive in the same world, they were created to defeat demons the other can’t see. 

When she is twelve, Elena kisses a boy because she likes being liked by boys, it makes her feel powerful and wonderful and beautiful and dangerous, and she realizes that nothing prepared them for reality, least of all their pretty games that they played as children. She runs home and dives under the bed and pulls out an old sword and shield and grabs her sister’s hand and they tiptoe through the twisting, winding tunnels of an ancient cave in pursuit of the Holy Grail, they fight off a dragon and a serpent and a helpful mouse leads them to their destination. They drink from the cup together and Elena says brightly, _now we can stay this way forever!_ and Dawn smiles very softly, far too wisely for a slight little ten-year-old with wild hair and scuffed knees and says, _as you wish_. 

As children, they are selfishly jealous of every other person in the universe, everything feels like a threat, like a battle, and they cannot help it. Dawn scolds their father because they really should be the same age. Elena cries into her soup because her eyes are brown instead of blue. Everything that disrupts the perfect mirror image tears away at them, it’s a nightmare that hovers behind them at every step. 

When she is ten, Elena breaks her arm falling off of her bicycle. Dawn is eight. A week later she falls off the jungle gym at school and sprains her wrist. When she is nine, Dawn twists her ankle at soccer practice. Elena is eleven. Three days later she lands too hard during a leap in ballet class and breaks her toe. Their parents laugh that they have two daughters and can’t ever just have one hospital bill. They link arms and say nothing at all. 

It feels as though it is chasing them, coming faster and faster, a storm in the distance that they cannot fight off no matter how hard they try. 

When Elena breaks her arm, Dawn feels something ugly clawing at her chest. It tells her that she isn’t every scar that her sister bears, it tells her that she isn’t every smile that her sister has. She wakes up in the night, shaking with fear, crawling closer to the warm body beside her as if she could crawl inside of her sister’s skin and never fear anything again.

When Dawn twists her ankle, Elena chokes on her own anger. She wants to rail at the injustices of the world, wants to take every blade of grass and grind it between her hands until there is nothing living left in the whole universe. She wakes up in the night, face covered in tears, crawling closer to the warm body beside her as if she could sink into her sister’s skin and dissolve like water, becoming a shield to protect her from everything forever. 

Children love in the most selfish and callous of ways. 

Children love in the most selfless and heartbreaking ways. They offer up their hearts without understanding the cost of walking around a shell with someone else carrying their soul in their pocket. They offer up their hearts without understanding the responsibility of holding another’s beating, bloody heart. They do not protect their hearts and have no idea how to protect one when it is given to them without a thought. 

They learn to love through their father’s stories of war and bloodshed, through their mother’s stories of whispers and creatures, through the pages of the stories that they love. They learn to love callously because all the best stories have a little more of a villain to them than a hero. They learn to love dishonestly because they don’t know how much their love is going to hurt. 

They hurt because they don’t yet understand their own hearts. 

Elena kisses Matt Donovan when she is twelve and it makes her feel dangerous and she wants more than anything in the whole wide world, to share that feeling with her sister, with her mirror. She writes, _it won’t feel real until she understands it, too_ and because she wrote it down, she makes it true. 

That’s how they’ve always been; putting words down on pages as if filling a page will make them as real as they want to feel. 

When Elena is ten and Dawn is eight, they had gotten into a fight at the park on their way home from school. A boy hisses at them and Dawn responds by jumping on his back, pushing him to the ground, and punching him in the face. The boy is maybe eleven or twelve, and could have turned the tables on scrawny little Dawn Saltzman, if Elena hadn’t joined in, kicking and scratching until a group of high schoolers wandering by had pulled them apart. Elena never learned what exactly the boy had said and didn’t care. The battles they had been training for, alone in their room, had suddenly sprouted in the real world, and it went exactly the way they had planned. 

They were triumphant. 

Learning how to fight against the world that threatened to tear them apart was quite a different truth than learning that there was nothing strong enough in the universe to break their bond. The difference, is not easy to see, and is a much more difficult lesson to learn. The difference, comes from within, and takes quite a bit more time to become apparent. 

Dawn kisses Matt Donovan when she is twelve and it makes her feel powerful and she wants more than anything in the whole wide world to let her sister know that she _finally_ understands. They are at a party and it was so easy, so terribly easy, to pull her sister’s boyfriend into a dark corner and press her lips against his. It’s so easy it almost could be boring, if she didn’t feel like a knight from their games from so long ago, hidden away in their room far from the prying eyes of other people. Dawn kisses Matt Donovan when she is twelve and it feels a little like waking up, and maybe it is, she wants to scream from the rooftop that she understands, she understands, she knows now. 

_What do you know?_ Elena whispers into her hair that night when they curl into their bed, wrapped around each other like children even if they’re not, they’re not, they’ve never been children the way that other people are children. 

She wants to say: I know we are better, I know we are more, I know we are stars and they are dust.  
She wants to say: I know we can crush them, I want to crush them, I want to watch you crush them.  
She wants to say: we are all of this and so much more, so much more.  
She wants to say: I am awake, I understand, I know. 

She says, _No one can ever take me away from you._

While they are young, they are fueled by jealousy and anger and any number of things that children call _love_ when they can’t know better. 

Adults want to think that children love the way they do in movies and stories, wide eyes staring up with angelic expressions, full of wise words informing of unconditional love. Who ever said that an angel’s love wasn’t dark and fragmented? Who ever saw a child and thought that they couldn’t be selfish and cruel? Who ever placed these two creatures side by side and claimed they were less or more than any other? A child’s love is frightfully conditional. A child’s love can be just as vain and ugly as any adult’s. 

While they are young, they love so strongly it bears down on them, a weight that they are not yet strong enough to bear. They hide behind an anger that feels like relief or a prayer for something more. They model their bodies after one another in the mad hope that should that heart, that precious heart that they care for more than their own, if turned in a different direction would still recognize them as a mirror. 

As they grow, the world loses its horrors. 

When she is twelve, Elena kisses Matt Donovan and feels powerful. 

When she is twelve, Dawn kisses Matt Donovan and knows, suddenly, that there is nothing to fear. 

As they grow, the world loses its horrors, and they become more dangerous. When they are young, they are fueled by jealousy because they do not know how to love; as they grow, they are fueled by the world-altering truth that they have nothing to fear. 

When a person has nothing to fear, they become truly horrible to behold. 

The world becomes their playground and the people in it a collection of the most beautiful toys. 

No longer under the threat of losing anything when they walk out the door, even alone, they go out into the world with a single-mindedness that could destroy the world, or create a new one. Whereas before, there were limits to what they could do, what they could have, what they could share – now there are no limits whatsoever. There is nothing to fear and nothing they can’t take from the jaws of the universe. 

Dawn traces the beginnings of their rule to the moment when she kisses Matt Donovan in the corner at a party when she is twelve, his hands fumbling at her waist, his lips soft and sweet, Elena’s eyes bright and proud boring into her from the other side of the room. She kisses him out of jealousy and fear and hatred, a deep hatred for this _boy_ who had touched her sister, had placed his mouth upon Elena’s mouth, whose hands had touched Elena’s skin, and she set out to destroy him. 

There are so many stories in the world, one must not pretend as though they only know the beautiful ones, the romantic ones. Dawn knows, at twelve, with a deep knowledge that fights against her every instinct, that to kiss her sister’s boyfriend was to commit a certain kind of treason, one that could break them apart. Yet, she walks into that party, still such a child, still full of so much resentful envy, determined to put a stop to the pain. 

So, she would start a war, and she would see it through. 

Somewhere, buried in a notebook long forgotten, Elena wrote of this day and this war long before it occurred. When she is twelve, Elena kissed Matt Donovan and felt powerful. When she was twelve, Elena came home from kissing Matt Donovan and wrote a story of a war, of a sister and a kiss and a boy thrown into the middle. In this story, there was bloodshed and fire and ruins that spread out over decades. When she was still a young girl, Elena wrote the story of their undoing, looked down at the words, and smiled. For though she felt powerful first and wise second, she always _knew_ the very same thing that her sister eventually learned. 

_Sometimes being older means I have to wait,_ she says, wrinkling her nose down at her sister, who hits her with a pillow and ignores her until she’d rather not. 

Elena watches her sister enter the party and locks eyes with her. She wants to scream at the top of her lungs, _Yes, now. I’m ready. I’m waiting. I’ve been waiting.”_

_But that would have broken all the rules._

_Elena watches her sister enter the party, watches her sidle up to Matt Donovan, watches her bat her eyelashes and her breath catches at how beautifully _scary_ her sister can be, watches her pull him away from the crowd. Elena watches her sister seduce her boyfriend in under ten minutes from across the room and is full of so much pride and desperate, mad, wild pleasure that she cannot account for it. _

_Elena watches her sister seduce her boyfriend and cannot feel betrayed. What is hers is her sisters. What she knows, her sister must know. What belongs to her is there only to be shared._

_There is a version of this story where her heart breaks, where she walks up to Matt Donovan and slaps him across the face in anger and betrayal, where she runs home in tears, where she sleeps in her own bed alone and angry, where her heart breaks. This version is locked away in a notebook to be read later, much later, with wine and much laughter._

_Elena watches her sister kiss a boy for the very first time, can see her blue eyes watching her from across the room, and her heart swells. She is too big for her body, she is too much for this world. She will explode and there will be nothing left of her. She holds onto that gaze, onto those blue eyes across the room, and reminds herself to breathe._

_She wants to say: I know we are superior, I know we are mountains and they are nothing._  
She wants to say: I know we can hurt them, I want to hurt them, I want to watch you hurt them.  
She wants to say: we are everything you can imagine and so much more, so much more.  
She wants to say: You are awake! I understand, I know. 

_They walk home arm in arm, and look up at the stars, and feel as though they are walking among them. They are children of eternity, they are immortal, they cannot be harmed._

_They are so very, very fragile and cannot see it._

_They lay down, side by side, and deep in their hearts, they know that it will always be this way and that soon, so desperately, tragically soon, everything will have to change. But enough change for one night._

_Elena lays next to her sister and wraps her long, thin arms around her sister’s long, thin body and cries when she finally hears the words she’s been waiting for._

__No one can ever take me away from you._ _

_**_four: rage a war and hide from it, put  
your heart up as collateral and never doubt it will come back to you_ ** _

_“They did _what_?!”_

_The house phone had rung in the middle of dinner and after a few seconds of everyone staring at each other in confusion, Isobel had run into the kitchen and made the ringing stop. He hadn’t even known that there _was_ a phone in the kitchen. When did they get a phone in the kitchen? _

_Alaric looked up at his daughters suspiciously at Isobel’s outburst. Dawn was spelling something out with her peas, a huge grin splitting her face wide, while Elena was scowling at her across the table, arms folded over her chest._

_Ten years of relative peace, ten years of perfect daughters with perfect grades and very little tears that didn’t have to do with physical pain or whatever the hell _Bridge to Terabithia_ was. _

_Ten years of thinking that parenting was going to be easy, and then the emails had started rolling in._

_First, the emails only came to Isobel, an unspoken understanding on behalf of school administration that mothers were better equipped to care about their teenage daughters’ misdeeds. Elena refusing to follow the dress code and trying to filibuster the guidance counselor into allowing her to skip Algebra while she was on her period. Dawn putting a strip of duct tape over the mouth of one of her classmates when she was annoyed and turning in a paper on relative physics instead of the American Revolution._

_And then he had started getting them, too. Carefully worded emails to “the parents of…” Something about the two of them and a student teacher from the university that he was really glad not to know the specific details of. Their petition to host a dance for same-sex couples only after the school board tried to stop a boy from bringing his male date to prom, that Isobel had framed and taken to her office at the university. Elena taking all of Dawn’s math tests and Dawn writing all of Elena’s Psychology papers._

_Ten years of silent, practically unknown principals and guidance counselors to feeling like he was on a first-name basis with the entire staff of their high school. All for things that he didn’t think were _that_ big of a deal, but since they kept getting emails about them, might be? _

_Alaric glared down at his chicken as Isobel’s voice kept up a steady rhythm in the kitchen, maybe he wasn’t very good at this parenthood thing. Maybe they should have punished the girls for spray-painting _murderer_ over the school-commissioned mural of Christopher Columbus instead of buying them the new phones they had asked for? _

_Maybe he should have encouraged them to be a little more mainstream until college?_

_Did they have friends? Did they date? Shouldn’t they? He didn’t even know. They got over a thousand signatures on their petition for a same-sex dance, but did they even want to go to prom?_

_“Well?” Elena’s voice cut through the silence._

_Alaric looked up to see Isobel sitting serenely across the table from him as if she’d never left. She raised her eyes to look back at him and he slumped down in his chair. He was going to need a drink for this. On his left, Dawn slipped away from the table silently without him noticing._

_“Well,” Isobel picked up her fork and turned to her daughter. “You aren’t allowed back at school, but I got them to let you take your finals from home.”_

_Dawn slipped a tumbler of whiskey next to Alaric’s plate and settled back down into her chair, a smug look on her face, “I told you.”_

_Elena rolled her eyes back, “You’re just lucky that mom is the one that answered the phone.”_

_“I didn’t even know there _was_ a phone in the kitchen,” Alaric said slowly. “When did we get a house phone, Bel?”_

_Isobel pointed at Dawn with her fork, “Tell your father what you did.”_

_Elena snorted as Dawn sighed, turning to Alaric with that expression he knew meant she had done something wrong and was going to try to spin it in his favor._

_He glanced at the clock over Isobel’s head. They had forty-five minutes to get this over with before the History channel aired another one of their masterful “aliens built the pyramids?!?!” documentaries. He’d been looking forward to it all week and had a series of txts in his phone from between him and Elena making predictions over the _new! evidence!_ that they had already seen on at least five other programs of the same type. Dawn was always the more long-winded of the two girls and something that got them expelled from school was sure to run longer than he was really willing to give time for. _

_“So… dad.” Dawn started, turning in her chair eagerly._

_Alaric held his hand up, “One. Complete. Sentence.”_

_Dawn stopped, her mouth hanging open slightly, her eyes narrowing in confusion._

_As a rule, the Saltzman dinner table celebrated well-constructed oration._

_“She set our History teacher’s car on fire,” Elena said placidly, taking a sip of water afterwards._

_Isobel’s eyes were sparkling._

_Alaric straightened in his chair. He had forty minutes and counting. He could parent, goddamnit. “Okay,’ he said slowly. “Why?”_

_“Why?” Isobel burst out._

_“Yes,” he glared at her. “Our daughter committed arson. I want to know why.”_

_“That’s where you’re starting, dad? You want to know why?” Elena looked like she was about to send him to his room without dessert._

_“You’re… grounded?” he looked at Dawn, who smiled brightly at him. He looked back at Isobel, who was rubbing her temples with her fingers, her eyes closed. “Look! I presume that my kid wouldn’t just _set a car on fire_ for the pleasure of seeing it burn since she’s never set anything on fire befo—Is this your first attempt at arson?”_

_Dawn nodded._

_“Okay then, I’d like to know why,” he looked pointedly at Elena, “I’d like _Dawn_ to tell me why.”_

_“She’s been pissed off at me ever since the prom petition. And then she gave me an _F_ on my paper last week.”_

_“The one on Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf?”_

_Dawn nodded._

_“I read that paper! That was an _A_ paper,” Alaric turned to Isobel in disbelief. “Are you hearing this?”_

_“You can’t just set cars on fire when you get a bad grade,” Isobel sighed._

_“Also the assignment was supposed to be on a leader at the turn-of-the-century,” Elena shot across the table at her sister, hackles raised._

_“It’s not _my_ fault the system is broken!” Dawn retorted. “She was a leader. At the beginning of _a_ century. What?”_

_“Lili’uokalani. CJ Walker. Emmeline Pankhurst. Duchess von Preussen. Annie Kenney. Clara Barton,” Elena counted off on her fingers in a manner that suggested this argument had been had in the same manner at least once before, but Dawn cut her off._

_“There was no reason to fail me.”_

_“There was no reason to _not do the assignment_ ,” Isobel cut in, giving Alaric a _a little help, please?_ look over their daughter’s heads. _

_Twenty minutes._

_“Why didn’t you do the assignment?” he floundered, because this seemed to be the root of the issue._

_“That’s not the issue,” Isobel said sternly._

_“That’s the _only_ issue!” Dawn protested. “I’m glad I got kicked out of that shitty school. I hated going there, anyway. We weren’t learning _anything_!”_

_The two girls bicker back and forth and Dawn drops the word _bourgeoisie_ at least three times, with Elena rolling her eyes and launching into a (somewhat bored) comeback. It feels a little rehearsed and slightly stale, probably because Isobel’s heard a thousand different versions of this argument between the three of them for years. _

_Finally, Elena sighed and then said in a tone that bordered more between bored and sarcastic than revolutionary, “ _It is time for us all to decide who we are. Do we fight for the right to a night at the opera now? Have you asked of yourself what's the price you might pay? Is this simply a game for rich young boy to play? The colors of the world are changing day by day! Red, the blood of angry men! Black, the dark of ages past! Red, a world about to dawn! Black, the night that ends at last!_ ” (1)_

_Alaric beamed at her and then looked at Isobel over the table, “Revolution!”_

_“No,” she shook her head. “Alaric, I am _warning_ you.”_

_Alaric managed to look mildly subdued. “So,” he looked from Dawn to Elena. “What do we do now?”_

_“Homeschool,” Dawn said resolutely. “I’m not going back to that hellscape posing as an education.”_

_“I am _not_ staying home every day, I’ll kill you all,” Elena warned. _

_“You’re not going to be homeschooled,” Isobel declared. “That’s ridiculous.”_

_“Private school?” Alaric mused out loud. “They’ve been bored at that school for years, maybe public school can’t get them what they need?”_

_Isobel rolled her eyes, “But when I said it five years ago we didn’t have the money, and you didn’t want them to grow up like that, and on and on.”_

_Dawn looked at Alaric accusingly, “You mean, we could have been at a private school all this time?”_

_Elena chuckled, “Watch out, dad. She’ll set fire to your car next.”_

_“No one is setting any more fires,” Isobel warned in a dangerous tone._

_“Well! Since we’ve decided that homeschool is out of the question,” Dawn handed Alaric a stack of papers. “Here you go.”_

_“Constance Billard?” Alaric read off the top page of a pile of forms that were suspiciously all already filled out. “Sounds fancy.” He signed all the lines Dawn had indicated with little plastic tabs without really looking at the papers thoroughly and then handed them over to Elena so she could pass them to Isobel._

_Ten minutes._

_Alaric took a final bite of chicken and pointed at Dawn, “You set a car on fire, you’re on dish-duty tonight. Elena,” he turned to his eldest daughter, from now on known as _the one least likely to set fire to shit when pissed off_ , “ten minutes to show time. You’re in charge of snacks.”_

_“You just ate,” Isobel said tiredly._

_“Snacks,” he pointed at his wife in his best no-nonsense manner and went into the living room._

_“It’s fine if you never tell me what really happened,” Isobel said quietly after Alaric left. “But you have to promise me never, _ever_ to resort to these lengths again.” She looked up at her daughters and sighed, “Next time, don’t get fucking caught.”_

_Isobel hid herself in the office for the rest of the night, going over the Constance Billard paperwork, making phone calls, and pretending to herself that she wasn’t (mostly) proud of her daughters for getting academic scholarship placements into the most prestigious private prep school in the city, especially since it wasn’t like they couldn’t afford it._

_Alone in the kitchen with her sister, waiting for the popcorn to pop and spooning chocolate ice cream into tall glasses, Elena hissed, “If you had just shown them the pictures of Miss Harris and Samantha, they would have understood.”_

_“And have them fight the school to let us back in, start a war with Miss Harris and the administration _again_? No way,” Dawn whispered back, looking up from the dishwasher to shoot her sister a determined glare. “You were the one that wanted to go to Constance and now we are.”_

_“Miss Harris is doing a shitty thing,” Elena said, eyeing the Coke as she poured it over the ice cream carefully._

_Dawn rested her chin on Elena’s shoulder for a moment, “People do shitty things sometimes. You can’t save the world.” She sighed, kissed Elena on the cheek softly, and turned back to the dishes. “Anyway, I already sent the pictures we took of them to the PTA anonymously so …”_

_“ELENA IT’S STARTING OH MY GOD WHERE IS MY POPCORN?!???” Alaric shouted from the living room._

_Elena dashed out of the kitchen balancing a bowl of popcorn, bag of Red Vines, and two glasses of Coke-floats in her hands. She settled onto the couch with Alaric, curling her legs underneath her as carefully as she could without spilling anything. “This had better be good,” she giggled._

_Alaric took one of the floats out of her hand carefully, “I just got played back there, didn’t I?”_

_“It’s okay dad, we’ve known for a while that _Les Mis_ is your weakness.”_

_“Guess you need new material,” he laughed around a mouthful of ice cream._

_“Nah,” Elena grabbed a handful of popcorn from the bowl in his lap. “We had this same conversation three months ago. It’s your Achilles heel.”_

_Alaric hummed, momentarily distracted by a commercial selling cat food. When it was over he looked at her, “If Dawn is the one that set the fire, why did you get expelled?”_

_She snuggled closer to him, her head on his shoulder, “I helped.” She didn’t sound terribly apologetic._

_He probably should have expected that._

_And then they shouted at the television for an hour. Halfway through Dawn joined them and reminded him that they had an extensive collection of similar ‘documentaries’ saved on the DVR for a rainy day. Sometime after midnight, he crawled into bed next to Isobel, who was sitting up reading, and felt particularly blessed. _

_“We have some amazing kids, you know?”_

_“Dawn set fire to a _car_ , Rick,” Isobel replied sharply._

_“Can you believe that Elena has that entire speech memorized?” he leaned up on one elbow, pushing his pillow underneath his side and smiled at her. “I mean, word for word, completely spot-on. And likening their education to a revolution of minds!?” He shook his head, “Amazing.”_

_“She’s used that line on you like five times in the past year alone,” she put the book down on her bedside table and folded her arms across her chest._

_He waved her statement away with his hand, as if he could literally see her sarcasm in the air between them, “Do you think it’s weird that they spend their Friday nights watching documentaries with me instead of going out with their friends? Shouldn’t I be chasing away teens with mohawks and lip piercings and leather jackets?”_

_“I think it’s weird that you talk about this so much.”_

_“Do you think we should get them tested?”_

_“For STD’s?”_

_“Do you think they are savants? Do you think they are like… so smart they can’t identify with their peers? Do you think we aren’t challenging them enough at home? Like those really smart dogs that start chewing on the furniture because they are bored?”_

_“I will literally pay you to stop talking about this.”_

_“I mean, the _complexity_ of their argument…”_

_“If you say the name Enjolras _one_ time I swear to god you’re sleeping on the couch for a month.”_

_“… I think we should be making a fund for Elena’s eventual Presidential Campaign…”_

_“I am giving you to the count of three, Alaric Saltzman.”_

_“… I guess she’ll have enough in donations but if she runs as an Independent…”_

_“One.”_

_“… do you think she’d make Dawn her Vice? Because I think …”_

_“Two.”_

_“…there’s never been an atheist in office before, but with her hair…”_

_“Three.”_

_“… should take them to see that on Broadway and —Hey, if you’re going to the kitchen can you bring back a glass of water?”_

_Isobel smiled at him from the door, her pillow and book in her hands, “Sure thing, hon.” She shut the door firmly and looked down the hall for a moment before squaring her shoulders and heading past the stairs. Couches were for husbands in the dog house, not for wives tired of their husband’s ridiculous monologues. At the end of the hall, the light under her daughters’ room was still on and so she entered without knocking, this was all their fault, anyway._

_Dawn was sitting on the ground with her back against the edge of the bed, a book in her lap, while Elena braided her hair._

_Isobel pointed to the other bed, which was covered in books and clothes, “Move.” And then she threw her pillow on the bed and crawled up behind Elena, lying down on her side. She watched Elena braid Dawn’s hair for a moment and then said, “New rule, no more French Revolution discussion at the dinner table. And no more arson. And one Friday a month, you aren’t allowed to be home. I don’t care what you fucking do, rob a bank if you want, but try to pretend like you are normal teenagers, okay?”_

_Elena wrapped an elastic around the end of Dawn’s hair and nodded, “Check and check.”_

_Dawn began throwing things off of the other bed, “Should we hire dudes on motorcycles to come by the house on Thanksgiving to fight over Elena’s hand in the driveway?”_

_“I think the barista he hates with the green hair and the lip piercing would pose as Dawn’s girlfriend if we promised never to bring him to that Starbucks ever again,” Elena giggled._

_“Go the fuck to sleep,” Isobel replied, turning her back on them._

_She woke up to a mouthful of Elena’s hair in her mouth and Dawn’s head on her stomach, Alaric peering down at them with tears in his eyes and three cups of coffee in his hands. “I hate you,” she growled at him before he could say something sappy and ridiculous. She must have been a little too close to Elena’s ear when she said it because the next thing Isobel knew, she was on the floor, landing face-first into the purple rug they’d bought for Dawn’s eleventh birthday._

_Above her, Dawn started laughing and she rolled away seconds before Dawn came crashing down to the floor beside her. Alaric leaned over them to hand Elena her coffee before backing away slowly, laughing as quietly as possible. He sat down on the floor and held out the other two cups to Isobel and Dawn, “You two should know better by now.”_

_Isobel sat up and snatched her mug out of his hands. It said _World’s Best Mom_ on it, a gift from when the girls were younger and still insisted on making Mother’s Day gifts by hand. Sitting up on the bed, her legs dangling over the side, face half-hidden by her own mug. Isobel glared at all of them, “I’m sending you two to live with Elena’s father.”_

_Alaric choked, “John? Isn’t he hunting… um… getting drunk in Europe or something?”_

_Dawn blew on her coffee slightly, “Mom what is it with you and alcoholics?”_

_“I think we should go camping next weekend,” Alaric said, ignoring Dawn’s comment._

_“We can’t go camping,” Isobel said slowly. “I’m sending the girls to John and then I’m running away. You can go by yourself.”_

_“You’re not allowed to run away,” Dawn said, standing up and collecting Elena’s already empty mug._

_“If you were going to run away, why not just leave the girls here with me?” Alaric asked, genuinely confused._

_“To punish you,” Isobel responded cheerfully. She took a sip of the coffee. It was terrible. She looked up at Dawn and held up her cup hopefully, “Why?”_

_“Because dad can’t make a decent cup of coffee to save his life.”_

_“Elena drank hers without bitching,” Alaric countered._

_They all looked at Elena, who shrugged, “Coffee is coffee.” Dawn coughed a little and she rolled her eyes, “I always drink the first cup too fast to really notice, sorry dad.”_

_“I’ll fix it,” Dawn grinned, stepping over Alaric._

_“And then you’re packing your bags,” Isobel called._

_“No one is going anywhere,” Elena said sharply. Alaric raised his eyebrows and nodded, pleased someone was finally on his side. “I already told Jeremy he could spend the summer with us and we all remember what happened the last time Jeremy and dad were left alone.”_

_Alaric’s face lit up, “Little Jeremy is coming for the summer?”_

_Isobel flopped back against the floor and stared up at the ceiling, muttering, “I hate _all_ of you.”_

_“I’m going for a run,” Elena said dismissively, already gone by the time Isobel lifted her head to respond._

_Alaric sparkled at her, “You love us.”_

_And it wasn’t _not_ true, so she really couldn’t argue. _

_**_five: accept defeat, your heart  
never belonged to you_ ** _

_It starts small – Matt Donovan, confused and young, with soft lips and a simple heart. _Don’t tell my sister,_ one says while the other watches, and he doesn’t. He’s flattered, he’s confused, he’s easy as a kitten and as lazy as a fat cat on a windowsill. They laugh afterwards, but dear child they aren’t laughing at him, they are just laughing. They find they love to laugh. When their hearts aren’t stuck in a vise, waiting to be torn asunder, they find that the whole world was waiting to amuse them. They kiss Matt Donovan and pet him and hold his hand and one whispers in his ear, _Don’t tell my sister_ , but she already knows_

_They play higher stakes when they get bored._

_They get bored so easily._

_(It takes some time before they realize what game they are playing, what they have to lose even as they take so much from the world as if they deserve it._

_They believe they deserve so much.)_

_At first, they are sloppy. A little cruel, using just a little more malice than they should. They are young. They are learning. The longer they are out in the world, playing their games with the whole world as their backdrop, the less it becomes about winning and the more it becomes about playing._

_Oh yes, Matt Donovan is about winning. They don’t want him to be. They wish that he wasn’t. And in the end, no one can really win, but games are for winning, battles are for winning, wars are for winning. Their first time must be about winning and losing and therefore, everyone has to lose._

__I hate boys,_ Dawn says, covered in tears. And she means it in a different way than her sister, she means it in a way that is bone-deep and beats in her blood. _

__I hate boys,_ Elena says, eyes full of fury. And she means it in a different way than her sister, she means it in a way that is abstract and sometimes a lie. _

_When they are twelve, they kiss Matt Donovan. They are twelve at different times and that is a scar on their hearts that will never fully heal. When they are twelve, they bring their games out of their childhood home and they lose, because everyone loses the first time they play a new game._

_Afterwards, they are ready to win._

_The second game they play has higher stakes. Her name is Cleo and she has pretty brown eyes and short, red hair that Elena longs to run her hands through and Dawn wants to paint under a sunbeam. Dawn looks at her and smiles and turns to her sister, they are hand-in-hand at the mall window-shopping, and says, _I think she could be so much prettier if she was crying._ And so they make her cry. _

_It’s a little too easy and afterwards Elena thinks maybe they shouldn’t do that every time. Something shatters in her heart shatters and piecing it back together has never been her strongest sport. Dawn says, _Maybe we shouldn’t do it that way every time,_ and that’s that. _

_The next game they play is quite a bit trickier. His name is Patrick and he is beautiful and his smile makes all the girls smile. Dawn hurts him like she was born for that purpose alone. It takes months, pulling him in with smiles and whispers. She tells him that she loves him and he kisses her like he believes it. When he finds her locked in a closet with Tammy McBride she shrugs her shoulders and doesn’t say anything at all. Elena is waiting inches away to pick up the pieces._

_She cries into his strong arms, looking up at him as though he was the one saving her. _My sister,_ she gasps, cradling his face with her delicate fingers, _is so mean_. He kisses her because his heart is broken and she says that she understands. He kisses her with his heart broken and held out as an offering. _

_Elena kisses him and she feels powerful._

_Dawn winks at her from across the room._

_They walk home together in the moonlight, arm-in-arm, feeling as tall as giants and as unbreakable as gods. They are very young still._

__I’m bored,_ Dawn says in their study, poking a cat with her foot, looking for a fight. Elena is txting Patrick and studying for exams and is not bored, she shrugs. Elena doesn’t want to give up Patrick yet, his heart isn’t whole yet, it won’t mean enough to break it now. She says, _Two more weeks._ She has a plan. _

_The next game Dawn begins is not like the others, and is just like the others. Isobel comes home to a kitchen full of girls making chocolate chip cookies for a club meeting and Alaric is beaming at them from the dining room – keeping his distance but also hovering in that way that he has. Elena is in her study with Patrick and Dawn has a troop of girls in the kitchen. She loves them, she dotes upon them, they dote upon her. She’s building an army._

_They trained on wars and battlefields, they held each other dying in their arms, they kissed each other goodbye, they were bound to become Generals in the end._

_It takes her a week to get them to do anything she chooses. She is young. She has them do terrible things and breaks their hearts. Elena breaks Patrick’s heart so that they can mourn together, lying in bed with licorice dipped in peanut butter because Dawn’s pain is greater and she gets to pick the snacks._

_They resolve not to be bullies next time, there’s no reason to break everything just because they can._

__The world is beautiful_ , Elena says. _Let it be beautiful._ It is a hard lesson to learn. She brings home one girl and then two and then three, wrapped up in tinsel and bows for her sister. They begin again. _

_It ends in tears._

_They are still working too hard, still fighting against a fear they cannot yet name._

_Dawn says, _But I loved them_ and it is almost true. She wanted to love them and that felt like enough. _Maybe I can only hurt the things I love_ she sobs into her sister’s shoulder. They sleep tangled up together, fingers entwined, two bodies and one heart. _

_There is a delicacy to holding another person’s heart in your hands, children are wont to throw their hearts at any passerby, children habitually pick hearts up off of the cold ground and grind them into dust before realizing they were holding on too tightly._

_Elena says, _But I could have loved him_ , she is older, she doesn’t lie in the same ways anymore. She wanted to love him and that wasn’t enough, but it felt close. _Maybe I can’t love anything unless it is broken_ she sobs into her sister’s soft neck. They sleep wrapped around each other, legs thrown over legs and hips, two bodies and one heart. _

_No matter how tight they cling to each other, they cannot hurt each other. They grew up damaging each other in every possible way, they have no shields when it comes to each other, there’s no reason to. No matter how tightly Elena holds onto Dawn’s wrist, she cannot break it. No matter how far Dawn pushes Elena away, she will always swing back. They have no time or subtlety for each other, what would be the point?_

_They are equal in destruction and hardness and softness in all the ways that the other needs._

_They made each other into the thing they needed most and forgot that the world cannot intuitively give them the same things in the same way._

_They start off too hard because they aren’t playing the right game, not really. They begin in stutters and starts. They seduce together and apart, they break hearts together and apart, they rule together and apart._

_They forget what they are._

_Because they haven’t learned it fully yet._

_They’ve only had so much time._

_In the end, they don’t learn it at all, what they were looking for, they stumble upon it like children in a fairy tale, a door opens and a wind whispers and then there they are, with an entirely new set of rules. Except they’ve been playing this game from the beginning, so it shouldn’t have been as much of a shock as they pretend that it is._

_They are at a party and he is beautiful, they want him. He has a strong jaw and a bright smile and he’s darker than he’d like people to know. They can sense it within him, a desire to watch someone cry, a desire to be strong enough to walk away from tears, a battle in his heart that stops him from being every version of himself he fears he could be. He’s the kind of dangerous, breakable thing that they could keep for a very, very long time. He’s the kind of fragile, heartless thing that could try to hurt them and break himself for trying._

_They want to let him try._

_Dawn lets him get her a drink, she giggles at him because giggling has always worked before, he smiles gamely and teases her. He walks away with his heart firmly in his chest._

_Elena lets him steal her away from another boy’s arm, she is forward with him, she wears her desire on her sleeve, he smiles gamely and flirts back. He walks away with his heart firmly in his chest._

_They take out their frustrations on a small girl with sad eyes that is too, too easy. They have her in tears within the hour, they leave the party and walk home arm-in-arm under the moonlight and feel reckless._

_He finds them a few months later, at a fundraiser that they’d rather not be at for their mother’s friends. They are standing in a corner, snarking about the guests and checking out the waitstaff, nervously watching their father’s alcohol intake because when he gets nervous he drinks and when he drinks he gets chatty and he’s always nervous around his wife’s socialite friends and when he’s chatty he’s confrontational about obscure historical facts. Elena’s arm is draped casually around Dawn’s waist and Dawn is playing with a strand of Elena’s hair absently._

__I’ve been wondering when you would show up again,_ he leans against the bar beside them and nods to the crowd, _Bored yet?_ They roll their eyes at him in unison because frankly seducing a boy like him under their mother’s nose is the worst idea and also because they’d long ago lost interest in his eyelashes and his ridiculous hair. They murmur to each other with amusement when Isobel swoops in to discreetly take Alaric’s drink out of his hand as if it were her own and wrap her arm around his shoulders. _So I should have guessed you two knew each other, didn’t put it together last time…_ he’s angling for something and they ignore him, uninterested. _

__Would you be willing to share?_ he takes a sip of his drink, he’s facing the crowd, but when they turn to face him in unison, he smiles. They let him usher them off to a back room they are very glad to learn the existence of and try to pretend they aren’t nervous. He takes one look at them, standing hand-in-hand, and smiles in such a delightfully shy way that they both fall a little bit in love with him, and don’t begrudge him for it. _

_He kisses Elena like she hung the moon, reverently and hesitantly, and she never lets go of Dawn’s hand. He kisses Dawn like she is the ocean and he’s been waiting his whole life to drown, greedily and hungrily, and she pulls Elena closer to her like a lifevest. When he looks at them shyly and says, _now kiss her_ they don’t hesitate and it is like taking a breath for the first time in their lives. _

_It feels like being alive and whole._

_They turn back to him, smiles on their lips, and he whispers, _damn_ and like that he gives up whatever power he thought he had. _

_As they walk away, he shakes his head slowly and tries to button his shirt with trembling fingers, and asks if he can call them. They both raise one eyebrow slowly. _Don’t you want to know my name,_ he splutters, dropping his hands in disgust. Elena takes pity on him, puts his shirt and dignity back together with a steady hand. _Sure_ , Dawn says, _What’s your name?__

__Baizen. Carter Baizen._ He smiles like his name should mean something. It doesn’t. _A little piece of advice?_ he calls out, stopping them again. They keep their faces smooth. They love him enough to let him have the last word. _The giggling and the flirting,_ he shakes his head. _Not your strongest suit. Stick with this, _he waves his hand at them, _this bored, slightly pissed off thing? It’s like scary-hot.____

___Elena smiles at him, her heart longing to reach out and squish him into a pocket-sized creature she can carry around and pet whenever she wants. She wants to own him, possess him, cut her teeth on him for months and years, but he’d be no good for that and that’s what she loves about him most. _We’ll take it under advisement,_ she says softly as Dawn tugs her out of the room and back to the party, back to their parents, back to their home and their bed. _ _ _

___Dawn slips into bed beside her and plays with her fingers in the dark, _You are **mine**.__ _ _

___And it is so true, so unbearably, desperately, frighteningly true._ _ _

___Divide and conquer was a phase, they think, a stepping-stone._ _ _

_____Step one, learn to work alone._  
Step two, learn to work in shifts.  
Step three, _never leave her side_. 

___The world is their playground and everything and everyone in it their playthings. They love their playthings, desperately and terribly. It’s easy to love everything they come in contact with a reckless abandon when there is nothing standing in their way and nothing that can hurt them._ _ _

___ _

___**_end: in the beginning. you are a circle, uncurable  
untraceable, unknowable, unlovable. and yet, you love. _ ** _ _ _

___ _

___When they walked through the doors of Constance Billard’s school for girls, it was in the middle of the largest power change-overs they had ever experienced. Potentially because, despite their disinterest in social politics, they were instinctively at the lead and no one had ever tried to unseat them. The foray into what could have been enemy territory was not a journey that they took without some degree of seriousness, even if Carter’s information seemed sketchy at best, it was what they had to work with._ _ _

___Elena could smell the upheaval in the air the minute they stepped through the doors and made up her mind, then and there, to play a different game. They were old enough, they could teach each other new tricks._ _ _

___“I have an idea,” she said at lunch, trailing her fingernails up and down Dawn’s wrist lazily, looking out at the clusters of girls that as of yet were too disturbed by whatever coup had taken place that morning than the two new students in their midst._ _ _

___“You want to crush someone?” Dawn asked through a mouthful of her peanut butter and salami sandwich, her attention primarily on the book spread out in front of her, her legs thrown over Elena’s lap._ _ _

___“No.”_ _ _

___Dawn looked up at her, blew a strand of hair off her face, and shook her head, “Wait. What?” She glanced suspiciously around, “You love it when we do that.”_ _ _

___“Fine,” Elena shrugged. “Pick a boy no one cares about.”_ _ _

___Dawn frowned, “I hate boys.”_ _ _

___She left the boys up to Elena without jealousy or dramatic tantrums. Elena could have any boy she wanted and Dawn could have any girl she wanted. They were so very rarely jealous anymore._ _ _

___Elena’s eyes scanned the crowd greedily, “I want them all.”_ _ _

___Dawn was bored at the thought, “You want to be Queen?” She had no desire to be Queen. There was always too much at stake, too much responsibility, very little wiggle-room. Dawn liked to have wiggle-room._ _ _

___“No,” Elena’s leg jiggled excitedly and Dawn dropped hers to the ground discontentedly. “I want them all. And then… then I want the Queen to come to us.”_ _ _

___Dawn followed her gaze. The Queen was holding court, a broken court, in a corner. Beside her was a fae-like creature with long blonde hair and long tan legs and a smaller girl with blonde hair and a crown already making its presence known. The Queen herself took Dawn’s breath away._ _ _

___She was nearly as terrifying as they were._ _ _

___“She won’t,” Dawn said serenely. “She’ll never come to us.”_ _ _

___Elena’s eyes glinted, “But she already wants to.”_ _ _

___ _

___They begin by doing everything in their normal way. Carter warned them, lounging on their bed in his boxers and with a smirk on his face, that their world was far too normal and quaint, they’d have to conform. But that would get them the crown and not the Queen._ _ _

___“She called an audible?” Carter looked genuinely distraught and Dawn kissed him because sometimes he just needed so desperately to be kissed. “She can’t do that,” he spluttered at her._ _ _

___“Well I did,” Elena said, bored. “I know what I’m doing.”_ _ _

___“You were nothing before me, baby,” he protested teasingly._ _ _

___They punished him soundly for it._ _ _

___ _

___They ran every morning in Central Park, they carried their books with them everywhere, they never talked about Gossip Girl, they made friends with everyone in a way that seemed clumsy. They were every bit themselves, only moreso. Dawn complained that it was a bit exhausting, but it was actually a bit of a relief. She fell over twice a day and laughed at herself, spilled coffee and didn’t apologize, snorted when she laughed and laughed harder. Elena smiled when she wanted and was sarcastic when she didn’t, she gossiped a little and was cruel sometimes, and studied whenever and wherever she liked._ _ _

___ _

___“I’m adopting Jenny Humphrey,” Dawn declared during their second week._ _ _

___Elena frowned slightly and jumped over a root encroaching on the running path, “Why?”_ _ _

___“I like her,” as if that was enough. After a few minutes of running she said, “Blair loves her.”_ _ _

___And that was that._ _ _

___They fell madly in love with her and Carter laughed a little. “Of _course_ you fell in love with a Humphrey.”_ _ _

___They don’t take him seriously anymore because they’d learned that he had once fallen in love with Serena. They pointed this out to him. He laughed harder._ _ _

___ _

___Everyone fell in love with them in due course, Elena nodded her head like she knew it work all along and because Dawn knew she was bluffing at least thirty percent of the time, she kissed her a bit more gently than normal. It wasn’t that hard, the whole damn lot of them were desperate to be loved and the Saltzman sisters were more than willing to love them all – damaged, bruised, broken, and ugly as they were._ _ _

___They doted upon Blair more than the others and pretended that they weren’t. This was Elena’s design. They laughed when she playacted with them and more than once Dawn longed to tease her for it. Just once, to take Blair’s hand and squeeze it with understanding, but it would ruin everything and so she didn’t._ _ _

___ _

___“I’m calling the Salvatores,” Elena pronounced as they did the dishes one night. “There’s a party at Blair’s in a couple of days and they’ll be perfect.”_ _ _

___Dawn thought about Stefan’s square jaw and Damon’s long fingers and shrugged, “You’ll have to be more careful with them this time.”_ _ _

___Elena smiled, “Damon will be your escort, of course.”_ _ _

___“I hate you,” Dawn growled._ _ _

___Elena glanced over her shoulder and then pressed a kiss against the side of her sister’s neck, biting gently._ _ _

___Damon looked charming on Dawn’s arm and when he fought with Elena halfway through the party and the brothers left in a hurry, Dawn did her best not to laugh. It didn’t have the immediate results that Elena had been hoping for, as Blair was so determined to pretend that they didn’t exist, but they both knew it was a long game they were playing._ _ _

___ _

___“We’re going to kiss tonight,” Dawn said firmly, wrapping her arms around Elena’s bare waist, throwing the dress in her sister’s hand to the ground. “And you’re wearing the yellow dress.”_ _ _

___“Why tonight?” Elena asked, leaning back into her arms._ _ _

___“Because Chuck Bass really, _really_ wants us to. If we wait any longer, it will seem like it was his idea.” Dawn wandered over to the closet and lifted out an emerald green dress. _ _ _

___They wore their hair down, just pinned up with matching flowers on opposite sides. They wore the same dress in different colors and the same heels in the same. They teased Nate and they argued with Dan and they were sweet with Serena and at the exact right moment, they pulled each other close and kissed in a way that suggested they had done so before, but not quite enough for it to be private._ _ _

___“It was a spectacle!” Elena said later that night, peering up from the bathtub at Dawn, who was taking off her makeup carefully in the mirror._ _ _

___“It was the most disgusting spectacle,” Dawn said wryly. “And yes,” she added before Elena could ask, “I definitely know that Blair saw exactly what you wanted her to see.”_ _ _

___After her bath, Elena crawled naked between the sheets and kissed Dawn the way she wished she could in the middle of a party with a drink in her hand and everyone looking, long and deep and _private_ , like a prayer or like penance. _ _ _

___ _

___At another party a month or a week or just hours later, there were so many parties now, Blair confronted them without seeming to, her martini glass held between deceptively light fingers. She wanted to ram it down their throats and the truth of that made Dawn’s eyes glint with want._ _ _

___“What is it like to kiss your sister at a party?” her voice was laced with curiosity pretending to be disdain. There was a heavy bit of desire that even the Queen herself could not hide._ _ _

___Dawn laughed and took the martini glass from her, a little bit terrified that Blair’s grip will slip and they will all be suddenly covered in sharp shards of glass and gin. Elena didn’t laugh, she liked to take Blair as seriously as possible, leaned over and kissed Dawn on the neck once, leaving behind a smear of bright red lipstick. She kept her eyes on Blair the entire time, her eyes open, honest, unrelenting in their appraisal._ _ _

___Dawn said, “Kissing your sister is a lot like kissing a mirror as a child, it’s saying, I am beautiful.”_ _ _

___Blair laughed hollowly, fear sparking in her eyes, that flicked to Jenny and back to them so quickly Elena almost missed it, “So you are a narcissist.”_ _ _

___Dawn broke her gaze, eyes sweeping the floor, because there was no response to that in a place like this. She had been looking for an escape, for a dark corner. She wanted to run her fingernails over Blair’s skin and hear her hiss in surprise at how good it could feel. Elena leaned into her to stop the instinct, anchoring her to the ground. By the time she looked back, Blair had been dragged off by one of her minions._ _ _

___Late that night, in their bed, panting under Elena’s fingers, she whined, “I want her.”_ _ _

___Elena leaned over her and smiled, “I knew you would.”_ _ _

___Sisters always know best._ _ _

___ _

___The next day, they ran into Blair while she was out shopping and she insisted on taking them to lunch. Elena accepted graciously because she was the gracious one. They talk about the usual things and not what was on everyone’s mind._ _ _

___When Blair pulled them into the bathroom and locked the door behind them, no one pretended not to understand everything, finally, and utterly._ _ _

___ _

___“You got your Queen,” Dawn said with a sigh._ _ _

___Elena traced a finger over her lips and smiled softly, “Yes, we did.”_ _ _

___They won them all. And it may have been worth it, or it may have not._ _ _

___ _

____I belong to you_ , Dawn said to her sister, whispered into the dark, a prayer and a plea and a hope. _ _ _

___And so she was made into something that belonged to this one, singular person._ _ _

____I belong to you,_ Elena said to her sister, a murmur in the night, a desire and a wish and a supplication. _ _ _

___And so she was made into something that could only be fully possessed by this one, particular person._ _ _


End file.
